This is a poem I wrote to myself to mark four years of living in the United Kindgom. It has and still is an experience. Many things have happened, most of it, life. I find myself asking questions and it doesn't feel very celebratory. I guess I just miss many things.

Fruity Flowers To Myself

 

Heart is in my mouth.

Part for fear, another with grief

This soil moulded me,

Its familiar grittiness embraces my feet

As I hurriedly step lightly, rapid

paces not schelping

I make quick my distance from my origin

in haste to my promise of green.

I do not kiss the soil

I do not take a stone and hide it in my palm

for remembrance.

I am a prodigal, seeking my path to a distant pledge

Not looking back,

as the warm tendrils of my mother’s earth slowly unravel

from my body and I embrace the frost of a strange mother.

I place my feet gently, gingerly on this grey earth.

There are no rich blacks and browns here to stain my feet

I kiss the earth

I take a blade of grass and chew

for acquaintance.

I am an embracer of this new thing, this new feeling

This new fear that slowly clasps its chains around me

as it claims my soul, my hands, my heart to grieve,

in shame at my dissolute ways, my headlong race to forget

the source of my identity.

I look back,

letting the stolen memories of my mother’s heat waft to me

from other women’s cooking pots

I seek the green embrace of my home in the clasp of others.

I hunt for unconditional acceptance in the eyes of every warm skin

I pass in the streets.

The cold wraps around my tender feet as my toes try to recall

the heat of that homeland soil.

The eye of my heart sheds a solitary tear, it rolls and lies quiet

at the bottom of my belly, its sting reminds me of who I once was.

Its salty trail tells me who I am now and its journey asks me

who I still wish to be.

Heart in my mouth

Part with grief, another for fear.

I wish to be moulded again.

 

Abi Idowu       

14/08/2008